What Is the Privileged Poet to Do?

In order for a privileged person to appreciate anything, there is a move toward the margins. For the poet, this means removing oneself as best as one can from the mainstream ideology or culture whose thinking is one of embracing the convenient answers to questions, allowing oneself unconsciously to be led, allowing the “experts” to answer for him or her. By remaining within the collective consciousness language eases fluent or as fluid so that platitudes, clichés, and group-think create for us. By moving toward the margins, the poet is moving to the periphery of the symbolic order also. I am convinced that it is at the margins where one finds possibility, not in worn-out phrases and ideas. There is at least hope there for a new language for describing and contemplating the plight of thinking for oneself within mainstream ideology that is pop culture.

The movement takes asking questions, tough (much of the time subtle) questions, of most everything experienced or heard in the day. It involves posing problems where many others think there are none and developing perspectival abilities beyond empathic rhetoric. It involves reading philosophy and gathering as many sides of the "news" as one can and then contextualizing, weighing, and reevaluating previous notions. One’s reading and living become truly experiences of educating the imagination as Northrop Frye has written. Moving toward the margins is never fully achieved and is always in process.